Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 266 for the week May 14 - 20, 2012.

In This Issue

A UDS retrospective

Ubuntu Stats

LoCo News

Launchpad News

Ubuntu Forums News

Jono Bacon: Precision and Reliability in Ubuntu Accomplishments

Martin Pitt: Debian/Ubuntu Packages for PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1

Jonathan Carter: Launchpad.net: bug 1 000 000

Mythbuntu: Default download link for 12.04 ISO is now 64-bit!

125,000 Ubuntu PCs to land in Pakistani students' laps

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS review

Linux Desktops: Cinnamon vs. Unity

Canonical’s Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix Evolves

An example of the usefulness of bittorrent for entirely legal purposes

Other Articles of Interest

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings

Weekly Official Ubuntu Flavors Team Meetings

Monthly Team Reports: April 2012

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04

And much more!

General Community News

A UDS retrospective

Jane Silber shares a retrospective of the latest Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California where "over 650 attendees came from all over the world." She reflected upon what made this UDS exceptional, with increased vendor support, debut of a Calxeda cluster, the first Ubuntu Cloud Day, a talk from Thomas Bushnell at Google about their deployment of Ubuntu desktops, and more. She wraps up with a quick history of UDS itself, including a full list of past locations for the summits.

Pangolin Party in Terrassa

The Catalan LoCo Team threw a 12.04 release party at the IES Nicolau Copèrnic School in Terrassa, near Barcelona. It featured an install root, lectures, a games room and an Ubuntu Server jam. With school students offering food and coffee, more then 200 registered attendees and some sponsorship, Rafael Carreras reports that the party turned out to be quite a success.

Launchpad News

One in a million

The one-millionth bug was filed on Launchpad, a milestone that marks seven years of work and dedication. Hitting the one-million mark helps show the success that Launchpad has reached and how it has matured over the period of time. J.C. Sackett notes that they are "handling 1 million bugs better now than we were handling 500,000 then." PPAs and set/reduced downtime are some features that have contributed to its success.

Ubuntu Forums News

New Theme is Here!!!

Mike Basinger announces that the Ubuntu Forums are now sporting a new theme that matches the updated branding. In addition to the new theme, a planned upgrade in the near future will bring "a mobile theme that will be a great benefit to our users, plus other new features."

The Planet

Jono Bacon: Precision and Reliability in Ubuntu Accomplishments

Jono Bacon talks about the large number of users who have begun testing Ubuntu Accomplishments, and how testing could be made to complement the new contributions by continuing to push quality and precision. He discusses a new tool called Battery that “runs all the accomplishments and feeds them this data that will cause an accomplishment to succeed as well as fail.” Planning for version 0.2 of Ubuntu Accomplishments is now under way.

Jonathan Carter: The "Software Packages" Meta-Track at UDS

Jonathan Carter blogs about software and packaging related sessions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Some of the big topics were reorganization of Ubuntu software archives, Application Review Board, the future of MOTU.

Martin Pitt: Debian/Ubuntu Packages for PostgreSQL 9.2 Beta 1

Martin Pitt calls for testers of the first Beta of PostgreSQL 9.2. It’s available via PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 and in the NEW queue for Debian. Pitt also mentions that the postgresql-common test suite found a regression, which has now been submitted upstream.

Jonathan Carter: Launchpad.net: bug 1 000 000

Jonathan Carter extends congratulations to the Launchpad team on reaching the milestone of the one-millionth bug filed, and for their success at building a platform that scales well. Carter goes on to note that, for every bug filed, 67 iPads have been sold, marking a clear target for the Edubuntu project to focus on in order to compete in the education markets.

Kees Cook: USB AVR fun

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit Kees Cook was able to convince some folks to load up a USB stick for a bit of fun with volunteers who don’t mind an Xorg crash, "so we could watch Xorg crash and wedge their console" to test the behavior of an AVR microprocessor connected to USB. He shares code details of how he did it, and progress of the Xorg bug which has subsequently been reported.

Mythbuntu: Default download link for 12.04 ISO is now 64-bit!

Following the release of MythTV 0.25, Mythbuntu announces that the default download for the 12.04 release is 64-bit. Reasons for the change include the fact that half of the users are currently using the 64-bit version, and two-thirds of the users have 64-bit capable machines.

Dylan McCall: Adventure and excitement at UDS-Q!

Dylan McCall shares a recap of UDS-Q. McCall first shares some details about the Ubuntu ecosystem, which ended up being a session “about how Ubuntu is doing as a platform for developers outside the project itself”. He also mentions later sessions, which covered outreach to application developers. Additionally, he discussed sessions covering localized ISOs, installer slide shows, and the new sound theme. He wraps up by sharing some photos and some details from his favorite plenaries.

IRC Council: Ubuntu IRC Council Position

A call for nominations for a spot on the IRC Council has been issued. "If you are an Ubuntu Member with a competent technical knowledge of IRC, a passion for IRC and a willingness to help maintain effective governance of our IRC community then you could be the leader we are looking for."

Martin Pitt: To boldly go where no test has gone before

Following the success of the QA related changes in 12.04, Martin Pitt hopes to extend automated testing even further, namely to the upsteam. He shares some ideas to begin with: fake hardware tests, work with Gnome developers to simplify and streamline testing, fake network devices, etc.

In The Press

125,000 Ubuntu PCs to land in Pakistani students' laps

The government in the Pakistani province of Punjab has started handing out free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university students. 125,000 laptops have been issued to be handed out so far, in an attempt by the government to support the local IT ecosystem. They plan to hand out twice as many laptops in 2013.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS review

PCPro writer "arien Graham-Smith describes the latest Ubuntu release as "an operating system that's ready for the big time.” But he also thinks Ubuntu will remain hamstrung by lack of official support for software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.

Linux Desktops: Cinnamon vs. Unity

Matt Hartley, Datamation, takes a look at both the Cinnamon and Unity desktop experiences and shares his thoughts on each. He concludes that “both desktop environments provide a strong, reliable experience” and makes suggestions based on beginner, intermediate and advanced users and says “if you haven't tried Unity in Ubuntu 12.04, don't let past experiences color your judgment of the desktop.”

In The Blogosphere

Ubuntu Developer Summit 12.10 Recap

Michael Larabel of Phoronix gives an effusive yet skeptical look towards the future of Ubuntu. For one, he certainly wasn’t entertained by EA’s keynote because it introduced what he describes as “crappy” games into the Ubuntu Software Center.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix Evolves

Christopher Tozzi at The Var Guy takes a look at the latest revisions to the Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix, stating that there have been “no sweeping changes” since it was introduced in February of 2012, but that it has been updated for the 12.04 LTS and “as such will likely enjoy greater appeal to enterprise users who want to stick to Ubuntu releases with long support life cycles.” Tozzi goes on to speculate upon the position of the Business Desktop Remix in Canonical’s overall business strategy.

Ubuntu Unity Used By Super Heroes on TV Show

Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! shares a clip from children’s show “Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters” where characters can “clearly be seen to be running a customised version of Ubuntu Unity desktop on their laptop” as are Evolution and the Ambiance theme.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Ubuntu

Jonquil McDaniel shares her list of 10 advantages and disadvantages of using Ubuntu. Pros include amount of support available, ease of use, speed compared to Windows and package management and among the cons are quality of support, problems with upgrades, and speed compared to other Linux distributions.

Glossary of Terms

Ubuntu - Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate